4 ms·

The moat he describes the one-percenters might aquire is government regulation. Creating an environment where only an exclusive club of companies is able to wor

by mg 3y ago

The moat he describes the one-percenters might aquire is government regulation. Creating an environment where only an exclusive club of companies is able to work on AI. Is that possible? Has that happened in any other industry? I can imagine it happening in a single country. But wouldn't research route around that country then? How is the situation in Europe, China, India, Canada, Japan ... ?

bbor 3y ago
Ehhh capital alone is plenty of a moat, esp when there’s no regulation to keep the market fair.
bugglebeetle 3y ago
Yes, the US government could try and do what they did with cryptography in the 90s and succeed.
Barrin92 3y ago
>But wouldn't research route around that country then? it already does. Stable Diffusion originated at LMU Munich with a lot of non-profit funding, EleutherAI and LAION are non-profit as well I think. The Chinese companies all have their own models anyway etc. So yes I also find it unlikely. Of course there'll always be one or two players a little bit ahead of the field at any given time but this stuff is almost entirely public research based. These models largely run on a few thousand lines of Python, public data and a ton of compute. The latter is the biggest bottleneck but that'll diminish as more manufacturers come online.
logicchains 3y ago
>Is that possible? Has that happened in any other industry? It's absolutely happened to the nuclear weapons industry. And Big AI is lobbying for the government to treat AI development the same way it treats nuclear proliferation.
- mg 3y ago
  There are more nuclear warheads in Russia than in the USA.
  - logicchains 3y ago
    Would you like to see a world where the only countries with their own AIs are Russia, the United States, China, France, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea, and all use of AI is controlled by the governments of those countries?
tomatocracy 3y ago
It's not all or nothing. For example, software patents are legal in some parts of the world and not in others - that doesn't mean they don't have value in creating an artificial barrier to entry / moat. The same is true of regulation.

by mg 3y ago

bbor 3y ago

Ehhh capital alone is plenty of a moat, esp when there’s no regulation to keep the market fair.

bugglebeetle 3y ago

Yes, the US government could try and do what they did with cryptography in the 90s and succeed.

Barrin92 3y ago

>But wouldn't research route around that country then? it already does. Stable Diffusion originated at LMU Munich with a lot of non-profit funding, EleutherAI and LAION are non-profit as well I think. The Chinese companies all have their own models anyway etc. So yes I also find it unlikely. Of course there'll always be one or two players a little bit ahead of the field at any given time but this stuff is almost entirely public research based. These models largely run on a few thousand lines of Python, public data and a ton of compute. The latter is the biggest bottleneck but that'll diminish as more manufacturers come online.

logicchains 3y ago

>Is that possible? Has that happened in any other industry? It's absolutely happened to the nuclear weapons industry. And Big AI is lobbying for the government to treat AI development the same way it treats nuclear proliferation.

mg 3y ago
There are more nuclear warheads in Russia than in the USA.
- logicchains 3y ago
  Would you like to see a world where the only countries with their own AIs are Russia, the United States, China, France, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea, and all use of AI is controlled by the governments of those countries?

tomatocracy 3y ago

It's not all or nothing. For example, software patents are legal in some parts of the world and not in others - that doesn't mean they don't have value in creating an artificial barrier to entry / moat. The same is true of regulation.